Notes from a Dead House (Vintage Classics)

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A very large focus of Fyodor’s narrative is his examination of the Russian character. It is unclear if any of the other prisoners described are based on actual convicts that Dostoyevsky knew during his incarceration. However, he provides a very interesting account of the attitudes and behaviors of several characters who have adapted to life of punishment and isolation. The appearance of any new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is always an event in a literary season. . . . [A] powerful new translation." — Open Letters Monthly The book is a loosely-knit collection of facts, events and philosophical discussion organised by "theme" rather than as a continuous story. Dostoevsky himself spent four years in exile in such a camp following his conviction for involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle. Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit which may be developed until at last it becomes a disease. I declare that the noblest nature can become so hardened and bestial that nothing distinguishes it from that of a wild animal. Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abn Much of the writing is about the psychological tension of imprisonment by others, in a state where the personal agency is stripped of you, where in a sense, you get used to being shiftless.

The appearance of any new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is always an event in a literary season. . . . [A] powerful new translation.”— Open Letters Monthly Here there is a world's apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own dress, its own manners and customs, and here is the house of the living dead - life as nowhere else and a people apart." And the story of this living dead is what Dostoevsky brings to us readers. Based loosely on his own prison experience, this semi-autobiographical novel chronicles the ten-year prison life of Alexander Petrovich in a Siberian prison.Excellent. . . . Dostoevsky's constant preoccupation is the meaning of human freedom and the prisoners' preservation of their dignity." — Harper's Magazine Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.” Very often among a certain highly intelligent type of people, quite paradoxical ideas will establish themselves. But they have suffered so much in their lives for these ideas, and have paid so high a price for them that it becomes very painful, indeed almost impossible, for them to part with them.”

Dostoyevsky’s heroic biographer Joseph Frank argues convincingly that the writer underwent a major conversion during his time in Omsk: he came to consider working-class Russian people less as “barbarians awaiting the light”—his own characterization of the view he’d had of the peasantry as a young revolutionary—than as representatives of spiritual light itself. Forced into close quarters with murderers, thieves, and petty criminals, Dostoyevsky came to believe, as Frank puts it, “in the moral beauty of the Russian peasantry, its infinite capacity to love and forgive those who had for so long sinned against it.” Our prison was at the far end of the citadel behind the ramparts. Peering through the crevices in the palisade in the hope of glimpsing something, one sees nothing but a little corner of the sky, and a high earthwork covered with the long grass of the steppe. Night and day sentries walk to and fro upon it. Then one suddenly realizes that whole years will pass during which one will see, through those same crevices in the palisade, the same sentinels pacing the same earthwork, and the same little corner of the sky, not just above the prison, but far and far away. This primary narrator is a semi-autobiographical fill-in for Dostoevsky, who served four years in a katorga, a penal colony for political prisoners in Siberia or Eastern Russia. Imprisoned for his subversive socialist values, Dostoevsky experienced the grueling truth of life in a labor camp firsthand. Aleksandr is a stand-in for the author’s gaze, and his perspectives on the morality of the penal system reflect the author’s own. Indeed, Aleksandr is little more than an outlet for Dostoevsky to display his condemnation of Russia’s carceral system and its dehumanizing methodology. Sushilov También es realmente crudo el modo en que nos cuenta la forma en la que los prisioneros eran azotados en sus espaldas y esto se relacionaba directamente a la gravedad de las penas que cumplían. Estos eran castigados con varazos que iban de los 500 hasta los 2000 azotes y se hacían en tandas, dado que era normal que el prisionero se desmayara luego de infligirles semejante un castigo tan violento en sus espaldas. Otros, directamente no lograban sobrevivir a este suplicio. One of the most harrowingly universal books Dostoevsky ever wrote. . . . It’s cause for no small celebration that the extraordinary series of translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky has now seized on Notes from The House of the Dead.”— The Buffalo News

Orlov is a particularly terrifying character, and he stands out as the worst of those imprisoned alongside Aleksandr. He is defiant and has hardened himself to pain. His arrogance almost leads to his death. Isaiah Fomich La primera parte culmina con dos capítulos que otorgan cierto alivio a tanto sufrimiento y crudeza y que tratan dos temas comunes a cualquier ser humano, por un lado la Navidad y por el otro, la posibilidad de algunos presidiarios de formar parte de una obra de teatro, lo cual es una manera de liberar tensiones a través de un personaje en acto y es en cierto modo, una reconexión con la literatura. However, he is also astonished at the convicts' abilities to commit murders without the slightest change in conscience. It was a stark contrast to his own heightened sensitivity. During this time in prison he began experiencing the epileptic seizures that would plague him for the rest of his life. Anything can be a prison, the mind, the body, religion, your class, your nationality, anything. Who keeps you in those mind-forged manacles? Only you. The prisoners heard him cry out once in his sleep at night:“Hold him, hold him! Cut his head off, his head, his head!...”

fue un hombre que supo aceptar y afrontar las desgracias de su vida con hombría y sin flaquezas, más que las físicas, dado que toda su vida padeció de epilepsia. De hecho, tres capítulos de la segunda parte transcurren en el hospital donde fue internado por esta enfermedad. In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. The book not only brought him fame but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing. As with all these memoirs, there is some fictionalising, shaping, rearranging, but the point of The House of the Dead was to tell the truth. So there is no plot. It’s not a novel. Many chapters are

Frank, Joseph (2010). Dostoevsky A Writer In His Time. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691128191. A beautiful hardcover edition of the first great prison memoir, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear.

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.”

The narrator, Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, has been sentenced to penalty deportation to Siberia and ten years of hard labour for murdering his wife. Nevertheless the basic line of detachment, there is an underlying sense of vastness and complexities of each destiny that only brushes against the main character as he goes on in repetitive and dull camp life. The book has the atmosphere of the life of a prisoner, somewhere between dreariness and cruelty. Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.” What are we here for? We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.”